WASHINGTON — Newt Gingrich woke up last week with an idea to heal America. This is not a remarkable event; Mr. Gingrich, the former speaker of the House, wakes up with about five new ideas most days, many of which are instantly snuffed out by the cold reason of daylight. In this case, though, he had an intriguing idea for his brethren in the Tea Party movement, which the N.A.A.C.P. had just accused of brooking racism: he suggested that they reach out to local chapters of the civil rights group and propose a series of joint town-hall-style meetings around the country.

Mr. Gingrich’s thinking here is that the two groups could bury their differences by focusing on a common economic agenda to “bring all Americans together.” He could be on to something — if, by “all Americans,” he means predominantly those who are old enough to remember when cigarettes were harmless and Strom Thurmond was a Democrat. The Tea Party and the N.A.A.C.P. represent disproportionately older memberships. And herein lies a problem with so much of our discussion about race and politics in the Obama era: we tend not to recognize the generational divide that underlies it.

The question of racism in the amorphous Tea Party movement is, of course, a serious one, since so much of the Republican Party seems to be in the thrall of its activists. There have been scattered reports around the country of racially charged rhetoric within the movement, most notably just before the vote on the new health care law last March, when Representative John Lewis, Democrat of Georgia, the legendary civil rights leader, was showered with hateful epithets outside the Capitol.

But the insidious presence of racism within some quarters of the movement — or, maybe more accurately in some cases, an utter indifference toward racial sensitivities — shouldn’t really surprise anyone. That’s not necessarily because a subset of these antigovernment ideologues are racist, per se, but in part because they are just plain old — at least relatively speaking. According to a survey by the Pew Research Center in June, 34 percent of Americans between the ages of 50 and 64 — and 29 percent of voters 65 and older — say they agree with the movement’s philosophy; among Americans 49 and younger, that percentage drops precipitously. A New York Times/CBS News poll in April found that fully three-quarters of self-identified Tea Party advocates were older than 45, and 29 percent were older than 64.

This does not mean that there aren’t hateful 25-year-olds coming to Tea Party rallies and letting fly racial slurs. What it does mean is that a sizable percentage of the Tea Party types were born into a segregated America, many of them in the South or in the new working-class suburbs of the North, and lived through the marches and riots that punctuated the cultural and political upheaval of the 1960s. Their racial attitudes, like their philosophies of governance, reflect their complicated journeys. (This is true for a lot of older, urban Democrats, too, who consider themselves liberal but whose racial commentary causes their grandchildren to recoil.)

White Americans of that generation are not the only ones whose longstanding views on race seem increasingly dated. The N.A.A.C.P. has over the years lost its currency among younger, more educated African-Americans, whose sense of opportunity is such that they are less convinced of their need for a traditional civil rights organization (let alone one with the word “colored” in its title). A lot of older civil rights leaders and black politicians have been frustrated with President Obama for not advancing a specific agenda for his fellow black Americans, a grievance that seems not to bother many younger African-Americans, for whom the civil rights movement is a chapter in a history text, rather than a searing memory.

In other words, we are living at an unusual moment when the rate of progress has been dizzying from one generation to the next, such that Americans older than 60, say, are rooted in a radically different sense of society from those younger than 40. And this generational tension — perhaps even more than race or wealth or demography — tends to fracture our politics.

Nowhere is this more evident than in our judgment of the president, who, at 48, stands right at the fulcrum of this generational teeter-totter. Sure, Mr. Obama fares better among black voters than among white ones, and better among poorer voters than wealthier ones, as you would expect with a Democratic president. But his presidency is largely defined in the public mind by the age of the beholder. To put it simply, the older you are, the less likely you are to support Mr. Obama, and vice versa.

According to Pew, there is nearly a 20-point spread between Mr. Obama’s approval ratings among voters younger than 30 and those older than 65. Among independent voters older than 50, Mr. Obama gets passing marks from only 35 percent, while about half of those voters 49 and younger say they approve of his performance in office.

These numbers probably do reflect some profound racial differences among the generations, but they are more indicative of how young and old Americans approach the issues of the day, generally. Older Americans now — no longer the New Deal generation, but the generation that remembers Vietnam, gas lines and court-ordered busing — are less enamored of expansive government than their parents were. They fear changes to their entitlement programs, even as they denounce the explosion in federal spending. They are less optimistic about the high-tech economy, more fearful of the impact of immigration and free trade.

If our leaders want to mend the rift in our political fabric, they might be better served convening meetings not between the white Tea Party advocates and their black contemporaries, but between estranged retirees and so-called millennials. Our national challenge is to reconcile vastly different American experiences. Race is a part of that disconnect, but it is not the whole.